


Let's Go Steal a Fear Entity

by Pom_Rania



Category: Leverage, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, I hope that's the right tag for "the weird stuff in series X is a thing in series Y", Simon Fairchild makes a cameo, listen I really wish we had some consensus on terms for different types of crossovers, mentions of Leitner, mentions of other Leverage and TMA characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:55:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 5,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23691955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pom_Rania/pseuds/Pom_Rania
Summary: The Leverage / Magnus Archives crossover nobody asked for. Primarily in bulletpoint or meta form, copied from my tumblr. It's about if the Leverage crew were both a) in the world of TMA, and b) connected with various Entities.The title isn't the greatest, but I haven't been able to think of a good title for all the months I've had this idea, and I needed something to use a title if it's to be on AO3.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35





	1. Intro: Nate

  * Nate Ford is in a bad place after the death of his son and the collapse of his marriage. A very bad place. Still, no matter what the police report might say, he didn’t try to commit suicide. Sure he can’t say exactly WHY he walked off the bridge and only narrowly survived by getting caught in some wires, but he was very drunk at the time; there must have been a seemingly-good reason.
  * Spoiler alert: there was no good reason; it just felt like it at the time.
  * That’s what the Web does to you, makes you think that its ideas are your ideas. 
  * Who decided to play with him, and were they the one who caught him, or was it the Web itself, or just random chance? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this story.
  * What matters is that Nate Ford has come to the interest of the Web, with his love for manipulation currently drowned out by his addiction, and he has nothing to hold him back from it, remind him of humanity, or even go “hey why are there all these cobwebs, I know you haven’t been taking good care of the place but damn”. 
  * He isn’t drunk when he takes the final step. He’s painfully sober, and it is his own decision. Twisted by grief and rage and desire for the power to FIX things, but does anyone ever make a decision uninfluenced by factors outside of themself?
  * He spends a lot of time thinking about that, and what’s been done to him and what he’s done, when he goes through the motions of prayer. 
  * He gets twitchy when in withdrawal. A careful eye might notice that the motions aren’t those of a normal alcoholic craving a drink, but it seems more like strings are pulling him, back and forth rapidly so he shakes. 
  * (Sometimes he’s in chemical withdrawal. Sometimes the withdrawal is from something less physical, but no less powerful.)
  * He’s always felt better when he’s in control of the situation, knows how to manipulate the people there. Just like drinking used to make him feel GOOD, instead of “not terrible”. 




	2. Intro: Sophie

  * Fittingly enough, Sophie Devereaux is playing a paranormal researcher when she first encounters something unmistakably supernatural. (It’s a great cover. You can go anywhere under the guise of “someone reported a ghost here”, and nobody will take you seriously, which means nobody sees you as a threat.)
  * She’s been half-listening all day to people telling her about their “experiences”, which generally boil down to “I was sleep-deprived and/or drunk and/or high and I saw something weird”. Most of her attention is focused on considering how to best approach the mark, but she has long since mastered the art of keeping an ear open if she hears something interesting. 
  * To her, it’s obvious, when the man approaches her, that he’s different from the rest of them. He looks genuinely terrified but trying to hold it together. It’s a welcome change. 
  * For a little while. 
  * He says that his best friend has been replaced by someone or something different. Now she’s no psychologist – all she’s learned about the human mind is from a very practical school – but she’s heard of delusions like that. They don’t normally involve the imposter looking completely different from the original, or have photographic evidence. 
  * She knows pictures can be faked; it’s not her specialty, but she’s made use of those in the field from time to time. But there’s always a reason behind it. And if someone simply wanted to terrify a working-class man – recently divorced, no real assets to speak of, she automatically notes – there are easier ways to do it. 
  * (She’s done some of them.)
  * All in all, she has no idea about whatever might be behind this. Not that it shows on her face, of course. She says meaningless phrases and makes comforting sounds, and eventually he leaves, nervous but not terrified, saying that he’ll be back soon. 
  * He doesn’t show up, and the next day she hears someone mention that he missed his appointment, in fact he hasn’t been seen at all today.
  * She leaves town pretty much immediately. It’s only smart, after all, if he vanished then they would look into his last known movements and find her, and she didn’t want to be caught up in an investigation. She could just move on to the next mark. 
  * She can insinuate her way into someone’s life. She makes a living off of it. But no matter how many credentials she fakes, even if they think that she belongs there now, people will know that she hadn’t been there before. 
  * (Sometimes she makes them believe that she was there all along, but that only works if her identity was someone “beneath notice”.)
  * She has replaced people before. It’s common to take on a person’s name and position, so long as everybody she interacts with as that identity, never knew the actual person. The great risk of that strategy is always the possibility of running into the name’s ex-coworker or old drinking buddy or whatever it might happen to be. Sometimes she can pull it off, if they aren’t particularly close to her identity, or if it was a long time ago. 
  * But what if that risk, simply wasn’t there? Even if one person saw through it… one person, against the world and years of records, isn’t much of a contest.
  * There’s no point in even thinking about it. It isn’t possible. Whatever was responsible for the story she heard, it was an anomaly.
  * Right?




	3. Intro: Eliot

  * Later, Eliot Spencer will say that the worst thing he ever did in his life, was while he was working for Damian Moreau. This is true. However, only the second-worst thing was actually under Moreau’s direct orders.
  * When your job description involves killing people, it’s hard to remember what’s normal. If you still care, then for any given situation you watch the people around you, see what they do and how they respond. Of course, this only means that you’ll learn what “normal” is for a particular group. 
  * People do drastic things in war, when they’re desperate. But he doesn’t have that excuse. He may have been outnumbered, but he’d survived worse odds before. 
  * He remembers how “right” and “wrong” used to be things he could feel bone-deep. If they hadn’t been stripped away from him years ago, he thinks that he would probably die from sheer horror and disgust at himself. 
  * Eventually, he will learn how to look at food again as something more than an unfortunate necessity for survival. Eventually, he’ll learn how to use a knife to create something that brings ACTUAL enjoyment, instead of that twisted mockery of pleasure. 
  * Blood means so many different things, and he wants to avoid all of them, tear out those pieces of himself. 
  * He’ll never be the innocent boy that he once was; that kid is long dead, buried with the corpse of the first person he killed. 
  * He’s not a good person. 
  * He might not even be a “person” any more. 
  * But he refuses to let himself be a monster again.




	4. Question about Eliot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous ask I received on tumblr: "wait is that meant to be slaughter!elliot or flesh!elliot? Honestly though thanks for putting up more tma/leverage I've been slightly obsessed since you first mentioned it and it's great!"

Okay, so “canonically” (as much as that means for a bullet-point thing I’m writing whenever I get the words) it’s going to be ambiguous. Just like in actual-canon, we never find out what Eliot did, only that it was Bad.

Whatever he did, and might have been, he isn’t any more. Eliot Spencer is “currently” NOT an avatar of anything, and will never be in the future. That is something that he actively rejects.

But yeah, I did write it with Flesh in mind; then I realized “you know what, they’re all Colours That Hate You, there’s no reason for whatever happened to have been just ONE aspect”, so Slaughter and/or Hunt and/or Desolation were also involved in The Incident.


	5. Intro: Parker

  * Parker is good at timing things.
  * (It’s an important skill when guard patrols go by on THIS schedule, and monitors rotate on THAT schedule, and it takes THIS long for a particular security system to kick in.)
  * She knows how long she should be falling before her harness slows her down – or she hits the ground and splatters, if something went wrong – and it has been twice that amount of time.
  * Thrice.
  * Four, five times.
  * Ten times as long.
  * Is there even a point in counting it any more?
  * She can’t see what might be around her. Light would only have drawn attention, and she memorized the plans and knew where everything was, so she didn’t need any illumination for this stage. 
  * She could be falling through a void for all she knows, just the wind whistling in her ears and brushing past her face and the familiar sensation in her gut that screams at her that she’s dropping. 
  * Her plan is already ruined; it depended on precise timing, which… this, whatever THIS is, messed up.
  * She doesn’t know what’s happening, and she can’t do anything about it.
  * Might as well lean back and enjoy it. She doesn’t often get that opportunity during a heist. 
  * She lands, eventually, like nothing ever happened. It’s way later than she planned to be here, but there’s no guards or alarms going off so everything’s good. 
  * The rush still carries her as she dances away, off the premises. She notices the old man – caucasian, thin, doesn’t appear to be a physical threat, no visible communication devices or insignia – and vaguely realizes that he’s staring at her wide-eyed, but he isn’t in her way so she doesn’t care.
  * Later he’ll introduce himself as Simon Fairchild, and try to position himself as some kind of superior or senior, and teach her about some kind of titan.
  * Weren’t the Titans a sports team? Or a ship that famously sank? Whatever.




	6. Comment about Parker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ask I received from thewolvesrunwild on tumblr: "Local adrenaline junkie Parker not swallowed by the Vast because rather than being terrified she was only Slightly Annoyed and actually rather enjoying herself "

Pretty much yeah!

In canon, Simon seems to preferably target people who like Vast-related stuff; the salvage diver, the skydiver, the whatsit going to the mountain. My current headcanon is that he gets a bigger “hit” out of it, when he can break their love and turn it into fear.

So, crazy thief who climbs tall buildings and jumps off of them? Fits his target profile perfectly.

In any Leverage/TMA crossover, if Simon Fairchild doesn’t at least try to send Parker into the Vast, then it’s missing an INCREDIBLE opportunity that’s very much in-character.

There was the possibility that it’d “work” on her, but that’s not a story I personally want to explore. And if she isn’t terrified by it, then it’d end up being basically the Best Carnival Ride Ever.


	7. Intro: Hardison

  * Alec Hardison quickly got used to the feeling of being watched. In the modern world, privacy is only an illusion, and you can’t go back to that illusion once you’ve used the cameras and data gathering for your own purposes.
  * There’s always someone watching, you can’t escape it. You can either try to ignore it, or you can learn to master it.
  * He types and he feels eyes on him, he eats and he feels eyes on him, he showers and he feels eyes on him. He’s checked the area. No cameras he can find, no signals he can detect. 
  * Maybe that doesn’t mean very much. Ever since finding that old webpage – he can practically smell the 80s coming off of its every pixel, just from remembering it – with its surprisingly-advanced software tips, he has been able to hack into cameras that seemingly don’t exist for anyone but him. 
  * He’s good at what he does, and part of that is knowing that you can’t stay complacent. Yesterday’s cutting-edge tech is tomorrow’s antique. If he has an unusual tool, then it only stands to reason that someone else might have it too. 
  * Let them watch. It doesn’t matter if they see his every move; they can’t copy what he does. 
  * You can tell a lot about a person from their digital records. What they buy, where they shop, who they call, when they move about. They don’t know how much they leave about them, like a dog shedding fur wherever it walks. If you want someone’s dirty secrets, that’s where you look first. 
  * He knows all that. 
  * He still feels the urge to observe his targets, to actually SEE what they’re doing, instead of groping through the tracks they leave behind. 
  * He can bankrupt some rich asshole and move all that money into accounts spread across the world; or he can bankrupt some rich asshole, move all that money into accounts spread across the world, and see the look on the rich asshole’s face when the first credit card gets declined. 
  * Knowledge is power, and in his realm, he is very powerful.




	8. What they know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let’s talk about how much the characters know about the Entities, in order of when I wrote about them.

Nate, for all that he’s an actual avatar of the Web, doesn’t know very much overall. He knows what “his side” is capable of, and that there’s a lot of Web plots going on (some of which he’s part of, some of which are done to him, some of which he doesn’t think he’s involved with), and he knows that there’s others out there who aren’t with the Web. He hasn’t really come into contact with them; he’s seen their handiwork a few times, and heard someone complain extensively about “the Lightless Flame”.

He knows who Leitner is – he’d known about the man even when he [Nate] was just an insurance agent – and he knows that certain books have certain… effects upon their readers. He has participated in the disposal of a Leitner or two, and the “redistribution” of a couple others, but he’s never had the time and energy to spare to look into them further. He’s aware of Salesa, but they’ve never had reason to cross paths.

* * *

  
Sophie, for her part, is actively investigating the “changelings” and anything like them. In the process of that, she’s come across a bunch of “oddities”, and she’s learned the warning signs for when something is both risky and unrelated. She knows that there are different groups associated with different actually-supernatural things; she’s aware of the politics and relationships between the people involved, both individually and as a group, but isn’t even aware of the Entities as a thing. She’s heard a few names, but she thinks of them as superstition, or maybe a minor local power.

She very intentionally does not pursue Leitner books – they’re both dangerous in and of themselves, and will draw unwanted attention – but she’s developed a good working relationship with Mikael Salesa.

* * *

  
Eliot has made it his business to learn as much as he can about the Entities, at least for practical purposes of protecting others from them and their cults. He’s aware of Smirke’s classification system, but he doesn’t find it useful. He can’t de-avatar someone, that’s way beyond his capabilities and it would ALSO draw too much attention to him if he even attempted it. But he can tell if someone’s been marked, and by what “shade” of Power, and give them low-level advice and protection. (Sometimes, the only help he can give is “make sure your will is up to date, and tell your family that you love them”, but he is intimately aware that so many people die without even that.)

He’s taken on a few jobs for Salesa from time to time, and the experience, directed by someone who knew how to stay mostly safe, was invaluable. He met Gertrude Robinson once, and she made him uncomfortable. All that strength of conviction, directed towards solving “big picture” things, and sacrificing whoever she deems necessary; he can’t necessarily say that she’s WRONG, but she reminds him of a part of his life that he deeply regrets.

* * *

  
Parker has never been normal, and from a young age, it seemed silly to her that people divided the world into “possible” and “impossible”. If something happens, then OBVIOUSLY it wasn’t impossible. She sees and hears a lot, going places that she isn’t supposed to be. She has a LOT of random knowledge, some of it highly advanced, but very little background information. She has some more knowledge about the Vast than others, from personal experience, and a bit from Simon Fairchild trying to tell her things.

If asked, she wouldn’t be able to say what she knows about the “supernatural”, because she doesn’t consider ANY of it to be supernatural; just “unusual”, a category which also includes unexpected mundane antiques, hairless cats, and winning the lottery when you haven’t rigged it.

* * *

  
Hardison knows NOTHING about the Entities or the supernatural, or at least nothing that both a) is true and b) he knows that it’s real and not just a story. Generally, the closest he comes to accepting the supernatural is a half-hearted religious belief, even when he has actually done things that are not natural. This is only mostly because he’s knee-deep in denial; he doesn’t want to admit to himself that a) he’s not “just that good” and he has “outside” assistance, and b) there are things that don’t fit with the world he’s learned. If he came to accept the truth, then there’s a lot of stories he’s come across, and he’s smart, he could figure out which ones are relevant and piece them together.

He recognizes the name “Leitner” as a rich guy who built a collection and then presumably died in the fire which destroyed the collection. The existence of the Lukas family irks him on a personal level, since they seem to be involved in everything but for no apparent reason, and very few of their records are kept digitally so he can’t look into them easily. 


	9. Powers: Nate

  * Nate’s the only full-fledged Avatar of the crew, with the Web. 
  * He can feel someone’s “strings”, of their strongest desires, and tug on those same “strings”. When he does so, he experiences it himself; so if someone is hungry and he tugs on their “I could really use a burger right about now” string, then he himself starts feeling hungry (and craving a burger) as well. 
  * There’s also something that he thinks of as “paired surrender to the web”. This doesn’t have very many practical purposes for him, other than freaking someone out; but it has become part of his Gloat, to serve as feeding the Web further. He can’t take control of say someone’s arm; but he can “serve” both his arm and the target’s arm to the Web, temporarily. That means that the target’s arm moves independent of the target’s control, and Nate’s arm moves likewise; something else is control of it for the moment. Listen I know this sounds awkward, but I can’t think of a better way to put it right now. 
  * He doesn’t rely on those powers. He’s damn good at manipulation just on a human level.
  * The “paired surrender to the web” tells his target, subtly, that the target was manipulated by more than just some con artists; and that feeds the Web. Because you can avoid being manipulated by other people, theoretically at least, but how do you avoid manipulation by a force you don’t understand? You can’t, thus the fear. 
  * He can “paint” an object or location with spiderwebs, but not with any precise control. So like, he couldn’t do a portrait using spiderwebs as the medium, but he could totally go into a room and cover everything but one chair with a thin layer of spiderwebs, if he wanted the place to look abandoned with the recent addition of a chair. 
  * There’s also some “passive” abilities he has.
  * For one, he doesn’t accidentally drop things any more, it just doesn’t happen. Things don’t accidentally fall out of his pockets either. They “stick” to him, slightly.
  * He’s also always aware of any spiders or spiderwebs in the vicinity. SOMETIMES he can track a specific one, if it’s placed on/in something, but it’s not reliable. 
  * These aren’t necessarily the “limits” of his abilities, but it’s what he has at the moment. 




	10. Powers: Eliot

  * Eliot is pretty much a normal human, albeit a tough and badass human. 
  * Everything of his, that isn’t just from acquiring knowledge like anyone else could do, is entirely about noticing Powers at work, and protecting himself somewhat from them.
  * Like, if Jude Perry grabbed his shoulder then he’d still prolly get a very nasty burn. However, he can tell someone is dangerous from looking at them (human), is good at dodging someone’s touch (human), knows that some people can burn with just a touch (human), can sense that someone is touched by Burn-It-All-Down-And-Exult-In-Ashes (not a human ability), and generally wears things that would give him a bit of extra protection (human). 
  * He’s slightly resistant to spooky things that would control his body, and moderately resistant to spooky things that would mess with his mind. Not on the level of an avatar, but he actually has a fighting chance; and he does his best to AVOID situations where he’d have “a fighting chance”, because that still means “a chance he might lose” and he never wants that, not with THIS stuff. 
  * He knows some stuff of “playing one Power against another”, but he almost never uses that; it’s his second-last resort. 
  * (He doesn’t talk about his last resort.)




	11. Powers: Parker

  * Parker has “shortcuts”. Sometimes, when she jumps, she ends up where she WANTED to be instead of where she EXPECTED to be.
  * It doesn’t happen very often when she’s by herself; it’s more likely in riskier jumps or with untested gear, when “landing” isn’t a certainty.
  * She knows that “shortcuts” happen more often when she takes Hardison with her.
  * Here’s what she doesn’t know: it’s a gift from the Vast, when she feeds it some fear. “Fear of falling”, from HER of all people, is a rare treat.
  * (Hardison’s fear, when she takes him on a jump, is more like potato chips; cheap and easy, but om nom nom.)
  * Wherever she is, there’s generally enough space to get lost in. It’s always easy for her to find hiding places.




	12. Powers: Sophie

  * For all her research into “changelings”, Sophie is pretty much baseline human.
  * However she is Very Good at what she does, which is manipulating people’s perspectives of her (and through that, anything else), and even avatars are still at least partially human, thus susceptible to her skills.
  * So she can definitely con an avatar into doing something that doesn’t visibly conflict with the avatar’s Patron.
  * (Basically, remember how Martin got Elias arrested, because Elias didn’t think to look into what Martin was doing? That’s how she tends to work, and it keeps her alive so far when going up against some very dangerous not-entirely-people.)
  * Her acting skills (while on a con) border on the supernatural, but they’re very definitely NOT supernatural; just pressing the limits of human ability.
  * There is one thing she has, that’s maybe-human-maybe-spooky, an extension of her grifting; and that is that sometimes she can emulate things that the different Powers would be interested in.
  * She can make herself seem like the perfect target, a potential recruit, or even someone who’s already touched by a particular Power. (For the last one, she doesn’t have any abilities associated with it – she’d have to resort to good old-fashioned trickery for that – but she just “registers” as such.)




	13. Powers: Hardison

  * Hardison can hack into cameras that don’t exist.
  * It’s important to note the “can hack” bits. This isn’t automatic knowledge; he has to go looking at a particular location and network, and there has to be the “plausible deniability” of him connecting to it through his tech.
  * And there’s not ALWAYS those “cameras” at any given place. Sometimes there’s lots, for any possible angle; sometimes there’s one that isn’t in a very convenient position.
  * Footage from those “cameras” doesn’t record properly. The best he’s ever managed was a low-resolution screenshot with substantial jpg artefacts, which shouldn’t even be a thing given the file format he saved the image in.
  * He doesn’t know this, but while he’s watching, he doesn’t get hungry or tired. (He’s used to marathon sessions in front of a computer, and tends to eat on autopilot while working; that’s why he’s never noticed.)




	14. Meeting the Archive crew: Jon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> timeline what timeline

  * Jon has so many “strings” that Nate can feel, and the thickest of them is “feed the Eye”. He’s learned to not tug on the Patron “strings” for other avatars, as it’s… very disconcerting. 
    * They don’t really like each other. At all. Nothing concrete, just a feeling of “ugh this guy”. 
    * Some of that is due to Jon’s understandable dislike for the Web, but a good chunk is just clashing personalities and having the exactly wrong amount of similarities.
  * Eliot feels constantly torn between “this man is potentially a threat” and “this man needs somebody to take care of him because damn he is a disaster”. It’s very disconcerting. 
    * When they get past their mutual distrust, at least for a moment, they compare scars. Because that’s a trope I always like so dammit it’s happening here.
  * Parker is one of the very few people who thinks that Jon is funny.
  * Hardison feels a weird mixture of kinship, superiority, and “is this what I’m going to become” towards Jon. 
    * (That last one isn’t a valid worry, they follow two very different approaches to Beholding.)
    * They spend a while very intently not talking to each other after Hardison makes a pop culture reference and Jon thinks that Hardison thinks Jon’s too old to understand it, and Hardison thinks Jon is being snooty and anti-nerd with his frosty response, and then there’s the additional complication that British and American pop culture doesn’t entirely overlap….
  * Sophie avoids Jon like the plague, because she is terrified of what will come out her mouth if he accidentally Asks her something.




	15. Meeting the Archive crew: Daisy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, timeline what timeline

  * Eliot UNDERSTANDS Daisy in a way that few people do. 
    * He knows bone-deep what it’s like to be part of a group, maybe you go too far but you have people at your side, and then leave it. He remembers, in every fibre of his being, tearing out a part of himself that gave a horrible joy and purpose. 
    * They maintain an uneasy relationship, of “we can speak frankly with each other, and go out drinking together, but I will always look at you as a potential threat to me and mine, no matter what kind of person you are right now”.   
(He has that dynamic with a lot of people, being who he is.)
  * Everything about Daisy sets Parker on edge. The “COP” aura she still emits even if she’s no longer on the force, the way she moves like a predator, and… the closest Parker can get to describing it is as a “lingering scent” that makes her feel trapped. 
    * The last two are only an issue when they meet in person, which happens as little as possible; but even in phone conversations, Daisy still sounds like a cop to Parker’s highly-trained “avoid cops” instincts.
  * Nate looks at Daisy, and can’t help thinking “easy to manipulate” over and over again. Not even tugging on her “strings”, although those make it more obvious; just working the human way, he feels he could get her to do almost anything with very little effort on his part. 
    * She screams “predator” to most people, but “prey for a clever spider” to him. 
    * When it’s easier to hold himself in check without mentally salivating, when he’s recently fed his Patron, he takes care to be incredibly forthright with her. (He’s more than a warm body for the Web to work through, he’ll prove it to himself.)
    * They tend to butt heads a lot.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes I know I don't have stuff for Sophie and Hardison here, but I originally wrote this months ago and I didn't have anything then, and I haven't been thinking enough about this AU to come up with something in the intervening time.


	16. General outline

It more-or-less follows Leverage canon, at least in broad strokes. First season has maybe a few spooky things added in, but all of them on a level of “plausible deniability”. Most of the crew doesn’t know that the others have been touched in some way or another; they definitely don’t talk about it. All their bad guys are “mundane”; any spooks are just hanging around opportunistically, not the main opponents.

Second season, the spooky ramps up a bit. There’s some communication about “hey I can do this thing and it isn’t entirely normal”, but not straight out saying or explaining things. A Leitner might be involved in one of their cons. One or two targets have been touched by a Power, but they don’t USE it; it just influences them. End of season two, Nate does something that is unequivocally spooky, because they’re desperate.

Between seasons two and three, the crew (minus Nate, who’s in jail) talk about spooky stuff, and gain a bit more of an understanding.

Season three, the Italian is an avatar of the Web. She wants them to take down Damian Moreau, but also some other targets for Web-related things. The crew gets more involved in the spooky side of things.

Season four, half the targets are mundane assholes, the other half are spooks (and also assholes).

Season five culminates in them not only releasing the “black book” info, but also stopping some ritual attempts. (And like, even though those rituals wouldn’t have WORKED, the ATTEMPTS would hurt a bunch of people.)

* * *

Part of Sophie’s development to season 5, is realizing that being a “changeling” isn’t really what she wants. There are implications that, if anything, she’s more Spiral-aligned.

It’s kept forever ambiguous, whether Sterling is a Web avatar or “just” a human who’s really good at making sure that things fall in his favour. It’s also kept ambiguous how much Sterling knows about the spooky side of things.

Gertrude Robinson makes a guest appearance, although we never see her specifically onscreen. Her actions influence stuff, and we hear her, and we see a group of people wherein one of those people is Gertrude Robinson, but it’s never pointed out which one she is.

Parker cares more about what fictional Hogwarts house someone would be in, than what actual Power they’re aligned with.

Gerry Keay never shows up onscreen, but he ends up making a con more complicated because he’d destroyed a Leitner that the crew was planning to use as a bargaining chip. They deal with that by Hardison forging the physical book, and Sophie manages to convince the target that the book is actually a Leitner and not just a book, because a) she’s just that good and b) she has a team backing her up.

Eliot and Hardison get into an argument about Smirke’s classification vs describing each thing as it’s experienced.

Once Maggie has gotten involved with the crew, they all assume that she knows about the spooky stuff. She doesn’t, actually; she knows that there’s things she doesn’t understand, but she just assumes it’s high-level crook things.

Speaking of Maggie, she can always tell when Nate is touching her “strings”, not even tugging on them yet. She doesn’t have that ability when it comes to other Web-related things; she’s just apparently supernaturally sensitive to her ex-husband trying to manipulate her. 


	17. Question about the Spiral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ask I received from rosejen8675 on tumblr:
> 
> So, for your Leverage TMA crossover, has the leverage gang had any brushes with the spiral? Their whole thing is about confusing and deceiving their targets, so I figure that might have caught the spiral's attention at some point.

Okay. Wow. This ask is INCREDIBLY old, sorry for mostly forgetting about it but I remembered this AU today and thought I’d ramble about it now.

I don’t think they ESPECIALLY interact much with the Spiral, at least not as a team, but there are situations of “overlap”.

So, here’s a couple scenarios I’m thinking of:

  * client is victimized by some rich asshole, but has the bad luck to ALSO be targeted by the Spiral. Eliot at least would do his best to also help with the latter, but it’s really outside of their “job description”.
  * client is victimized by some rich asshole who is associated with the Spiral. This would bring them in direct conflict with one manifestation of the Spiral, but it’s “nothing personal”.
  * after the team destroys their target’s life, said target falls victim to the Spiral



But like, the main thing with the Spiral is that it’s about distorting someone’s sense of reality, IN ORDER for them to feel fear. The Leverage team, they might distort someone’s apparent reality, but they want it to be “invisible” from the inside; they want their target to feel SAFE, because that’s when they’re most vulnerable. I’m imagining some “professional disdain” from the Spiral towards the team, like “you could be so good at this yet you choose to go the exact opposite direction”.

The Entity interaction that MOST sticks out to me, vs the Leverage team, is the Buried. What’s their phrase again? Something like “you’re under a heavy weight, that it feels like you can’t get out of”. The Leverage team EXPLICITLY goes against a good chunk of the non-physical things that the Buried stands for.

…which now leads me to think that, you know that one episode where Hardison gets buried alive? Yeah. The main bad guys in that episode might not have been Buried, but there would be some connections there.


End file.
